Clash of Eagles by Carol Clark
In the 1840s, in the middle of the Mexican-American War, the secretary of the Navy authorized Lt. William Francis Lynch to command an unusual expedition east to Ottoman Palestine, now Israel and Jordan, to map the Dead Sea. Horses weren't strong enough, so Lynch improvised with foul-tempered camels to haul metal boats overland from the Mediterranean to theSea of Galilee. Traversing this backwater of a dying empire, he forged life-saving alliances with a Bedouin sheikh and a Hashemite sharif, and he and his men navigated the treacherous, uncharted rapids of the Jordan, braving fatal heat and shortages of food and water before reaching Jerusalem--but why?The expedition followed a long tradition of quasi-scientific expeditions as it tried to establish definitively, where others had failed, that the Dead Sea lay below sea level. But did it generate enough knowledge to justify the expense or the suffering of the fifteen Americans who joined Lynch's obsessive quest? Was it the result of one man's deadly ambition? A religious pilgrimage? A publicity stunt? Or the first step in returning Muslim Palestine to its former glory as a Judeo-Christian land of milk and honey? In vivid, absorbing detail--richly illustrated with engaging historical drawings and maps--Clash of Eagles masterfully recounts this seemingly foolhardy mission and America's first footsteps in the Middle East.
Lynch's expedition-and he was the driving force-is a story worth telling and sharingClark's book chronicles well their considerable travails on land and sea. She also puts the expedition into the wider context of American history and provides information on previous attempts to study the Dead Sea and figure out the sea level. Given that the Dead Sea is currently disappearing at the rate of one meter per year, the documentation of Lynch and his team provides important benchmarks and data to stand as witness to the sea's conditions before this depletion began.-Barbara A. Porter, director of the American Center of Oriental Research, Amman, Jordan
Carol Clark is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso and has written more than fifty magazine articles, a book about nineteenth-century newspapers, and nine textbooks. The winner of a Fulbright Award to Jordan in 2008 to 2009, she discovered William Lynch's story while at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780762778423 |
| ISBN 10 | 0762778423 |
| Title | Clash of Eagles |
| Author | Carol Clark |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Lyons Press |
| Year published | 2012-09-18 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |